


The Gold Haired Girl

by CaptainKirby



Category: Original Work
Genre: Adrenaline, Depression, POV First Person, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-17
Updated: 2015-11-17
Packaged: 2018-05-02 01:07:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5228066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaptainKirby/pseuds/CaptainKirby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a legend of someone at the Harken's Girls School, who's beauty rival's that of Aphrodite. One day, a lonely boy finds her diary, and finds himself a part of the awful life she has lived.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Gold Haired Girl

The Gold Hair Girl

 

 

I noticed her at school one day. She stood at the center of attention, as gossip predicted. She went to the all girls' school across the street from the all boys' school I attended, so I had no reason to notice her. I believe her name is Midori, but I only knew this because people whispered in hallways when talking about a girl of such beauty to rival Aphrodite. Their hushed voices spoke of long eyelashes, bright blue eyes, and silky smooth skin. The aesthetics dominated conversations about the girl with the gold hair, but no one spoke of those precious strands that grew from her head.

It wasn't until I noticed her that one day that I truly thought of her as a real person. Before then she was a mere phantom, no more substantial than fog in the air or flames from a fire. This led me to see some faults in the gossip I'd heard. One problem was that everything I heard came from the eyes of testosterone filled boys. So, all the descriptions of her looks were spot on, except they forgot to mention one detail. They never did describe her hair, which makes sense since I have now seen it myself and am at a loss for words. However, for the sake of imagery I'll describe it in less than a thousand words. It was cut rather short, dangling just below her ears. And it was as straight as the trajectory of an arrow shot by Apollo. Everything about her hair gave the impression that it was as celestial. For the color, I will describe it as gold because that is what it was, maybe some would say slightly more orange, but not comparing it to a precious metal would be an injustice. However it didn't seem metallic, it gave a very organic vibe.

 I also believe that saying she was the center of attention gives the wrong impression. She spoke only with two people, her friends probably. Two girls with slender figures, one with slightly tanned skin and black hair and the other with less notable exposure to the sun and brown hair. There was nothing special about the gold hair girl's demeanor. She wasn't profoundly outgoing or notably introverted. I guess what made her stand out was the focus of those around her. They split their attention between their own mundane conversations and her. Not only boys, but also girls who saw her every day stole sideways glances at her. Then I heard groups start dancing around her name, eventually uttering it in the flesh. Stories began to form. I could make out a few lines of gossip.

"I heard that she always has at least two boyfriends."

"She even dated a girl for a while."

"Someone told me that every morning presents arrive at her door from past lovers."

The gossip became more and more absurd overtime. She was the high school version of Jay Gatsby, except everyone knew what she looked like. The crowd began to move out, back to their homes or the housing provided by the school if a family lived too far away. That's where I lived, so I never had to leave campus. I lost sight of the gold hair girl as the crowd moved along. Then, I noticed an irregularity in the elevation of the ground under my foot. I looked down and saw a small notebook on the ground. I picked it up out of curiosity. I checked the inside cover for a name, but didn't find one. Instead I found this passage:

 

_3/10/14_

_Hello Diary,_

_I believe that since we will be together for at least the next few months I should introduce myself. I'm Midori Goud. Some people say my name is pretty, but I don't listen to that sort of praise. I guess I would like something a bit more honest than that. I attend the Harkens Girls School, where I will attend classes until I graduate and move on to college, as that's the usual progression of things. That is, if I manage to survive high school. I can feel the eyes of my peers already scrutinizing me, so it'll be a long few years. I guess that my experience would make some girls envious, always someone looking at me around every corner I turn, but that just hurts now. I'll describe myself simply for you since you are a book and don't have eyes. I am a bit more than five feet tall, have a figure that most would consider desirable because there is not much thickness to it, and I have gold hair._

_-Midori_

 

I took a second to reconcile what I had just read before putting the diary away. I didn't bother to read any more passages because I didn't need to dig any further into the private thoughts of Midori Goud. However, I was intrigued by the personality I saw. The crowd had thinned while I was reading, so I decided to try to find Midori and give her the diary the next day.

Will power is a very strange thing. It's mind over mind. It is something you have complete control over. And yet, I could not stop myself that night from getting out of bed, retrieving the notebook out of my backpack and reading more. I couldn't stop thinking of what secrets the diary might hold, especially for someone who is so revered in social circles. I also noticed that some of the pages stuck together from being wet, small droplets of dampened paper appeared through the notebook. Some times it would get mixed with the pen she used and it looked as if the letters were crying with make up on. I will share below a few of the passages, but not all. They became repetitive between these dates.

 

_5/23/14_

_Good Evening Diary,_

_It keeps happening, and I don't know why. Everyone keeps shooting me strange looks, and very few people will talk to me. All of the boys that I've tried to talk to avoid me, but they keep looking at me. I want this to stop. I'm not a princess._

_-Midori_

_7/2/14_

_Morning Diary,_

_I'm sorry I didn't write last night, I just couldn't muster it after what happened. I was at a concert, and saw some of the girls from my class, and went over to join them and listen to the music. When I reached them, they kept asking me why I was there._

_"You here to watch your boyfriend perform?"_

_"Did he buy you tickets?"_

_"God, you are so lucky."_

_They wouldn't let me even tell them what I was there for, just to listen to one of my favorite bands, but they wouldn't leave me alone. When I tried to leave they followed me, I don't think that they understood what they were doing. I know they weren't trying to be cruel, but it felt like an emotional version of assault and battery._

_"How do you get your hair to look like that?"_

_"Do you use conditioner?"_

_"Was it always that color?"_

_"I want to be more like you Midori."_

_The last one put me over the top. I just stopped and dropped my head, they stopped trying to get answers out of me once the next song started._

_-Midori_

_9/7/14_

_I know its late Diary but..._

_The back to school dance... That was such a bad idea. Why must everything I do be misunderstood..._

_I went alone, I was supposed to perform one of my songs for the dance part way through the event. My damned hair kept alerting people that I was there and then the questions began. The dance was a mixer for our school and the boys school across the way, so everyone was there with a friend or someone. I kept having conversations like this._

_"Who are you with?"_

_"No one."_

_"He dumped you before the dance?"_

_"Who?"_

_"Your boyfriend."_

_"I NEVER HAD A BOYFRIEND"_

_"It's ok, no need to deny it, happens to the best of us."_

_I couldn't enjoy myself, lose myself in the music. People kept stopping me from dancing. Even the boys who were alone wouldn't even come close to me because they all assumed I was "taken"._

_Then came the performance. Oh why did I have to write that kind of a song for the performance. They had a band set up with the usual drum set, guitar, bass, and keyboard, with a local band playing. I had given them the music a week before, so they knew what was coming when I got up on stage. The entire crowd cheered when they saw that I was going to perform, but not because they thought the performance was going to be spectacular. No one had heard me play. I practiced by myself in my room by watching videos. I guess my parents had heard me play, so they could critique my singing and my form. But they did not care this crowd did not care about the fact that I had played piano for ten years, that I had won an award for one of my original pieces, they cared about one thing._

_"Who is this song for Midori?"_

_I tried to ignore them as I moved the microphone over to the keyboard. and introduced myself and the song._

_"Hello, I am Midori Goud, and this song is called Remember the Days."_

_I won't go through the effort of trying to describe the tune or the rhythm, since you have no ears and do not know what sound is. All that really matters is really the last line of the chorus, and you can guess what the rest of it was about_

_But I already miss you so_

_Everyone had his or her own interpretation of what it meant. Not that it meant anything. I wrote it because it was musical, not because I had lost someone. Well, I guess you could say that I lost everyone. I lost the ability to be a normal person to literally everyone. I don't know why my life has been like this, but it has. When the song finished everyone cheered and I ran out of the room as fast as I could, but rumors travel at the speed of sound, and an entertaining lie is more interesting to the masses than the boring truth._

_-Midori_

_1/15/15_

_I'm Done Diary,_

_This is probably the last time that I am going to write in here. I will probably file you away. Maybe if someone finds you then maybe you can tell him or her of my life over the past year. Its too bad, junior year in high school and I'm already defeated._

_Bye Diary._

_-Midori._

I'm not much for sentimental sympathy, or really for reading too much between the lines, but at least one tear slid down my face after when I closed the book. The twenty five pages after that last entry there were blank. I remembered that dance. I went alone, because I had no need to ask anyone, and no one asked me. I didn't have any friends at that time, not that I have friends now. I was one of those kids alone in the corner. I also remembered how I thought about talking to Midori at least twice, but never worked up the courage to do it. I didn't know why I was so scared, but I realized what the problem was later.

I remembered my exact thought process that day, and I believe it went something like this:

 

"I'm at a dance! Look at me being social!"

"You're standing in a corner nodding to music."

"Well... It's better than doing it in a room by myself. I should go in there and dance!"

"No, idiot! You'll look pathetic if you dance there alone."

"You're right, who should I ask to dance with me?"

"Wow, you really are clueless aren't you?"

"The word is 'eager'. Look! There's a girl over there who seems to be alone."

"She's getting swarmed by people."

"But she doesn't seem to have a date!"

"You are really going to go all the way in there to ask her to dance."

"Yeah!" I took a few foolish steps toward the group of people.

"Hey, they're all leaving..."

"And now she's up against a wall by her self."

"Now's the time!"

"Dude, look at her, if she wanted someone to dance with, she could have just pointed at one of the guys in that group and started."

"Yeah..."

"She probably already has a date or something."

"Yeah..."

"Anyways, she's too pretty for you. And popular."

"I guess I should stick to something more in my league."

"Yup."

"I guess I'll go back to this corner then."

"Finally, something I can get behind."

 

What I didn't realize is that she was probably crying. Her head in her hands, no one around her, back against a wall. Something about all that should indicate some sort of sadness. It makes sense that I didn't catch it because I was excited about going to a dance. I also remembered the song she sung. It was good, very good. It was mostly piano which she played remarkably. And her singing! I honestly never thought that she could create such a feeling of sorrow in me with just her voice.

Thinking over the story that lay before me in the diary, I almost shed another tear. Then I remembered the last passage. Saying good-bye to her diary? Did she mean to drop it? And that resigned tone struck me too. I remember a time when I sounded a bit like that. Giving up. No where to go...

Then I realized something else odd about the last entry, specifically how she said good-bye. There was no real reason to say goodbye, the diary had plenty of pages left blank. Oh, no... Bad, bad. I am not the brightest bulb in the bunch, since it took me this long to realize what was probably happening.

Suicide is something that I realized I will never commit, not due to some will to live or moral principle, but because I simply could not bring myself to do it. However, all of the signs of depression that I've ever had, or ever heard of, seemed to here.

I checked my clock and saw that it was 1:00 on January 16th. CRAP. I put on a jacket, grabbed the diary and hurried outside. My mind started yelling at me about what I needed to do.

"Go go go!"

"No, this isn't your place."

"What do you mean?"

"It's her problem let her deal with it."

"NO!"

"What?"

"I said NO!"

"Fine then, but you can't just run there and expect her to stop from listening to you."

"What other choice do I have?"

"Call 911?"

"First of all, if someone picks up that would be a miracle at this hour—"

"It's 911. If course they'll pick up.

"And second of all it's about a thirty minute drive from here to the city if they did pick up."

"Wow voice of emotion, I'm impressed with your reasoning."

"Why.... Why thank you."

"We have a goal! Don’t get flattered now!"

"Right, right."

 

While that happened I ran down the stairs and onto the street. I remembered that she was heading back to the school-provided housing so....

At this point there were two paths I could have taken, one of a more passive nature and try to sort it out later, or I could actually become part of the events that unfolded in front of me. Surprisingly enough I, like Robert Frost, took the path less travelled. But instead of regretting my decision like some English teachers argue Frost did, I felt a rush of exhilaration. I stopped thinking and started observing myself, as if some courageous person took over my body and now I was free to watch from a first person perspective. I shook slightly from the below zero temperatures of the winter night, and had to run through the snow, which fell lightly from a grey cloud sky. The moon had run off to another planet for all the sky cared, because it shed no light that night. The snow began soaking through my slippers, freezing my feet, but that just gave me another reason to run fast.

The doors to the apartment complex were unlocked, but a security guard made sure no one tried to enter the building without permission. She sat behind a large desk with a turnstile on the left. Normally I would have remembered that the guard wouldn't let a boy like me into the girl's housing. But I didn't think such profound thoughts at the time. When I burst into that lobby area, the guard started yelling at me, but was shut out by the loud beat of my heart. My eyes set on the door to the stairs (because someone with that much adrenaline pumping through his veins is not going to wait for an elevator), which lay a few feet past the desk. When I was ten feet away she pulled out her Taser, but that didn't slow me in the slightest. Five feet away, she fired. I dived head first below the array of small electrical conduits heading for me. I felt a brief shock down my left calve. I rolled a foot or so and then resumed my running without slowing down. I jumped up onto the desk and into the security guard, who was so caught off guard that she didn't follow me immediately up the stairs or even took another shot at me.

Then I began to climb the stairs as fast as I could. My left leg moved slower than the rest of me, probably due to the electrical charge that had been shot through it not long before. I had regained control over my actions once more, but with a vengeance that could be compared to a soldier fighting for his life. Except I was fighting for someone else's life. The adrenaline had worn off, but not my energy. I felt my legs burning as they climbed the stairs; my left leg was especially bad. My chest cramped tight, I began wishing that I had actually worked out at some point in my life.

"No, no! Can't think about that right now. She might die!"

 I refocused my self as I climbed the last set of stairs I saw the door at the top, it had been left slightly ajar, perfect. The door to the ceiling locks from both sides. I began to hear far below me the steps of the security guard pounding the stairs twice as fast as mine. Five more stairs. My throat became unable to take in air. I held my breath and continued. Three more stairs. I felt a bit dizzy, and like a firefighter running through a burning building. Two more stairs. Left leg up, right leg up. One more. Screw the last stair. I lunged through the door onto the roof and kicked the door shut behind me.

The roof was an oddly desolate place. A flat ground, a small step, and that was it. Past that was nothing but open air. Well, that and the girl standing at the edge of the step. She did not face me; she was looking out into the night sky, with the small flecks of snow falling from above. You could see the trees with their light powdering on them as if they had been painted for the occasion. I noticed a slight breeze in the air that accompanied the bone-chilling cold of that moonless January night. The breeze blew the girl's short, golden hair to the left. Her uniform skirt seemed to imitate her hair, sweeping to the side to reveal where leggings stopped and thigh began. She wore a white blouse that fit her casually. Her arms hung limply from her sides, but her legs quivered either with fear or from the cold. Probably both. Then I realized that I had no clue what I was supposed to do at that point.

"It's pretty isn't it? The night sky with snowfall, a warm December turning over to the icy clutches of winter, the white cover that everything gets. Makes one forget that the world is more than just black and white." The girl cocked her head to the side before straightening it once again and turning around. She seemed surprised. I was surprised. I don't remember thinking any of those words as they exited my mouth, but I managed it, and now here I had her attention. She looked right at me, with close to no emotion across her face. Her blue eyes did not hide behind her eyelids. A few seconds passed, during which my entire body tensed with anticipation. I could see her rationalizing whether she should spend a few more minutes before leaving here forever.

"It is nice."

"Up here for the view?"

"Some would say that..."

"You know, it's an utter waste for you to jump here." A slight smile came to my face, not that this was a time for chat, but I tried something. I tried to replicate that smile of understanding that is described as once in a lifetime. Midori blinked and looked down at her feet.

"Why's that? I'm done." Her voice felt resigned, like it was just done with everything. Sensing that I was losing her, I responded quickly.

"There must be someone out there, family, friends, someone who you..."

"There is no one!" Her voice shook from all the rage behind that yell, "My family left me here. My friends left me when the rumors started. I was never allowed to even look at a boy without created a whole round of gossip, let alone get close to any person, boy or girl or even dog, to love anyone!"

"I know."

"No you don't. You have no clue how it feels."

"Are you sure?"

"Positive."

"Then let me see if this rings a bell. You are alone. You've been that way for years. No one will listen to you as you try your politest to tell your story. You write something down, then never give it to anyone, in hope that someone will just find it." She turned away from me out toward the night sky.

"Then I guess I will enlighten you. If you jump from this height there is a ninety percent chance you will achieve your goal of removing yourself from this world. If you jump and orient yourself randomly, if you hit legs first, enough of your body will absorb the impact before your head that you will just be in extreme pain, and since I am pretty sure that police are coming someone would get to you before you bleed to death. But ninety percent, that's a pretty low chance given the consequence of failing."

"How do you know that?"

"Because I almost made the mistake you made. I just did some math before I committed. It was just before the beginning of this school year. I had been here for two years, and not a single person wanted to talk to me. I was so looked down upon for my inability to hold a conversation that I actually could be used a people repellant. So, I said screw it, if it's this bad now, there's no way for me to fix it. I had done some calculations one night and came up with those numbers for someone of my mass jumping off a building like this."

"What stopped you?"

"Well, I wanted to make sure that my life was really as bad as I thought it was, and I heard that there was a back to school dance. I decided to try it just to see if I had the guts to go and talk to someone." I looked up and the girl was still standing on the ledge, but her eyes seemed to be tearing up a little bit. Her legs had stopped shaking, and her mouth began to turn downward a bit. "I was pretty bad at it, I never did talk to anyone that night, I never even danced, but I remembered seeing a girl perform a song about losing someone, and that same girl being alone. I went to the roof of the boys housing and stood there on a ledge as you are now, shaking and all. I had almost convinced myself to jump when the lyrics of that song came back into my head. I sung the entire song to myself, and then got off the ledge, knowing how badly I would have felt if that song was about me. I realize now I was kidding myself, there was no way that song was about me. But that's ok. It never really needed to be."

I slowly stood up and started singing that song.

"It hurt when I lost you. I couldn't stand too. All of the world seemed to slip away. And I still have to wake up every day." I had moved towards her quite a ways, so now I was only a few feet away. She still was on the ledge, but she seemed to relax a bit. Her eyes seemed to hold quite a bit of pain behind them, but that pain seemed to be leaving now, in the form of water. I offered her my hand to help her down. She looked at the offered appendage, and then at me. She seemed confused.

"To me, you're just a normal person, who has undergone extraordinary pain. There's no need to succumb to being singled out anymore. Besides, you can't live on this ledge, you can't leave the world like this." She looked at me again, she had been quiet for an awfully long time now, probably too drowned in her thoughts and emotions to actually respond. She then straightened up a bit, as if some confidence had come to her.

"You're right." She smiled. I smiled back at her. Nailed it.

 

Then she started leaning back.

"No!" I reached out for her hand, but grasped nothing but air. She seemed to then fall in slow motion. I looked over the edge one last time. The moonlight put her on stage for all the world to see, well all the world that was up that late. I thought I saw her mouth the words "thank you". Her hair seemed to freeze as she fell, ignoring the air around it and remain in its picturesque shape and position. It came down far enough to just pass her ears, but in the front is topped just above her brown eyebrows. Her thin smile struck me as at peace, her eyes relaxed as if a large burden had been taken off her shoulders.

I saw her hit the ground, but not in gory detail. It was simple, she just stopped moving, both vertically and horizontally. I took a moment to reconcile what just happened. I had her. Correction, I almost had her. I started crying. It's been about six hours since, and, as you can see officer, I am still crying.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this about a year ago. And for any of you caring souls out there, I'm fine. I just have a dark imagination that thought of this and said "this would make a good story".


End file.
